Crisis of Leadership in SA Government

President Thabo Mbeki is harming South Africa's reputation abroad, new research has revealed.

An analysis of global media coverage on SA over the past 18 months, undertaken by research group Media Tenor, shows that when Mbeki looks bad, South Africa looks bad.

The report suggests that Mbeki's failure to mediate a peaceful political solution in Zimbabwe and his persistent defence of Robert Mugabe have dealt a severe blow to the country's international standing.

"Western media have grown particularly intolerant of President Mbeki and the country's foreign policy in relation to Zimbabwe, and they are increasingly linking crime, xenophobia and the power outages to a crisis of leadership in the government as well as the ANC," the report notes.

This also implicates ANC president Jacob Zuma, whose recent charm offensive abroad did little to change attitudes about SA, the report suggests. In fact, his visit appears to have entrenched what has lately become an overwhelmingly negative outlook for SA in the eyes of the world's media.

But it is Mbeki who gets most of the blame.

"To date, Mr Mbeki's profile in the international media has degenerated into a single story issue, his relationship with Robert Mugabe," the report notes. This has been aggravated by negative reports relating to crime, the electricity crisis and xenophobia.
The authors of the report warn that increasingly negative international news reports, in both qualitative and quantitative terms, risk damaging SA's developmental goals of attracting foreign investment, luring higher numbers of tourists and improving relations with its trading partners.

The research is based on an analysis of media coverage by more than 100 newspapers from 15 geo-politically representative countries.